PC Buyers Guide - October 2002 - Hard Disk Drives

You've all been waiting for it and now its here! Come join Nick Swan as he gives us the newest edition of the TweakTown Buyer's Guide. With some very interesting additions to the PC world this past month, it is time to see what was worthy to be added to the ranks of the best. Come see for yourself!

When Quantum and Maxtor joined forces some time ago, the competition in the hard disk industry began to thin out. Add to that IBM's woeful 60GXP and 75GXP hard drives which suffered very frequent data loss and complete failure (thankfully the newer GXP120 is better) and the market is left with three main forces - Maxtor, Seagate and Western Digital. In recent times, all three companies have put out excellent drives and Maxtor went the next step and added ATA-133 support to their drives.

The Western Digital drives, or WD for short, supports ATA-100, spins at 7200 RPM (revolutions per minute), has a 2MB buffer, an average Read Seek time of 8.9ms and comes in sizes from 20-120GB. If you're in need of some serious space, the 80-120 GB models also come in a "Special Edition" format, which ups the buffer to a massive 8MB. All the drives come with WD's special Data Lifeguard, which is a group of software utilities that tries to identify problems on the disk and then fix them before they result in data loss.

Warranty Issues

As of a few days ago, around the 20th of September in Australia, nearly every hard drive sold in Australia, and I would assume the world, now comes with a one year warranty. This is down on the previous 3-year warranty, so be wary of this. Previously there were a lot of issues with the IBM GXP 60 and 75 DeskStar hard drives (leading to them being called DeathStars), where they were blowing up (literally in some cases). These two drives, the WD and Seagate, are not know to blow up, but be wary of this issue.

The performance of the normal WD drives is excellent, but the performance of the Special Edition drives are unbelievable. In many cases they can outperform a SCSI drive, which obviously puts them ahead of the Maxtor and Seagate IDE drives. With a buffer of 8MB and performance that can beat SCSI drives, the WD Caviar Special Edition drives are the ones to get. Couple these together in a RAID array and you can get even higher performance (and an awful lot of HDD space seeing as they only come in 80-120 GB sizes). The choice of size is yours but it's going to take a lot of programs, MP3's and DIVX to fill even the 80GB model up.

If you're in the market for a hard drive that can support insane FSB speeds, the Seagate Barracuda IV drives have been getting a reputation for just that. Take a look if that's your cup of tea.

Even though a few motherboards with SATA (serial ATA) support are filtering through, like the Abit IT7 MAX 2, there still doesn't seem to be any SATA drives for sale. I have seen some benchmarks of the Seagate Barracuda 5 SATA HDD, in which it murdered this drive performance-wise. If you can hold on until the Seagate Barracuda 5 is out, I'd certainly wait.

The Seagate Barracuda IV can't keep up to the Special Edition WD's, thanks to their massive buffer size, but they can surpass the normal WD Caviar drives in performance and are slightly cheaper. The Barracuda IV comes in sizes ranging from 20-80GB, has a 2MB buffer, spins at 7200 RPM, has an average Read Seek Time of 9ms and supports ATA-100. Like the WD drives, they have a data protection system, in this case called 3D Defense System. They also come with a 3-year warranty.

As I've said, the performance is better than the normal WD drives and they are priced slightly cheaper. The Maxtor drives support ATA-133, but you will rarely exceed a transfer rate of 100MBytes a second so there's nothing to worry about. To cap it all off, they have a reputation for supporting crazy FSB speeds, which is a big plus for extreme overclockers. Finally, when the Barracuda IV was first released, it had issues with running in RAID at any decent speed. However, the new Barracuda IV's do not have this problem, due to a firmware upgrade, so these drives are a decent choice for a RAID array.